Individual DirecShow merit on audio renders

Question

My computer has two external audiocards and one in the motherboard with windows vista. In Vista it sees two entities for the same soundcard, a digital- and a analog output.

When i try to play an videofile with digital audio, say an dvd, it chooses 'Default DirectSound' whereas i want it to use 'Digital Output Auzentech'. So i thought easy enough, i just change the merit for 'Digital Output Auzentech' to a value higher than the others, so it would be picked, when a application tries to build an play-graph.

The problem i have is that all audio entities has the same id, so by changing 'Digital Output Auzentech', the 'Default Direct Sound' gets the same merit. I believe to have searched google-dry for information about merit, directshow and audiorenders, but still haven't found an answer.

Maybe some of the bright minds, who hang out here could help me

(tools i have used is GSpot and GraphEdit on a Vista Ultimate 32bit)

Answer 1

Why would you want to tinker with "merit" of directshow filters? Won't that be a bit overkill. Digital audio or not in your video file, you can use any output device here. So you can even stick your 'Digital Output Auzentech' for all the audio on your system, not just for dvd.

If you just want to select 'Digital Output Auzentech' for a particular apps, then I believe most decent apps let you do that. If you want to do and overrides all your apps (not the apps setting but it's windows' default setting), then head to "Sound and Audio Devices" under control panel (this is for xp, vista had something similiar, but I can't recall it's name), under audio tabs, change your Sound Playback Default device to 'Digital Output Auzentech', that's it. Then all your audio will be output from it.

Personally I use Media Player Classic, if I have AC3 or ACC track on the movie, and prefer to enjoy full digital output, I can easily switch from the Sound Filter settings.

Answer 2

Thanks for the reply faulty

Its kinda because i'm lazy. My audiocard is attached by an optical cable to hifi setup, and when i'm watching dvd, moviefiles with DTS og DD audio tracks i want it to autoswitch to digital source so i can enable SPDIF. Its because of the new protected media path and other stuff in vista, that has made this harder, because in the ol' days (winxp) it would do DTS Connect and SPDIF the "right" way without having me to automatically change the default audio output device. And another thing is i use windows media center and windows media player because i find them the best applications for media playback.

By the solution you propose setting the digital output as default, my pc would output PCM in games, music etc. whereas when there is a digital audio track the spdif capabiliaty would work. But i don't want PCM sterio when i play games, i want 5.1 sound many games offer DTS encoded, so i wont need to either switch audio channel on my amp nor in windows settings. I know many others with the same problem, when they switched to vista and some have more or less accepted the solution, by switching manually, but i refuse :)

And i got to the idea that if i could change merit settings for someting like PCM audio renders to be the digital output rather than the defaut directsound output, my autoswitching problem would be solved, hence for PCM audio my audio render by choice would be favored.

And by using my solution, all Directshow applications, say Itunes, (going out on a limb here) powerdvd, itunes, mpc etc. would utilize my settings if they don't have implemented or overridden the merit system.

I haven't found any other more likely solutions, than setting the merit for audio renders, which unfortunately i can't get to work properly. Any other suggestions are welcome and i will be willing to try, however it will not be likely i'm going to change my default usage of MCE nor WMP. I have tried other players out and i don't like most of them.